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Jazz
review by Gregory Avery, 5 January
2001
It seems only natural that,
after having dealt with America's most bitter internal conflict (The
Civil War) and its most indigenous pastime (Baseball), Ken
Burns' should turn his attention to America's most indigenous music.
Burns has been working on Jazz for several years, now -- with
some time-outs for looks at architect Frank Lloyd Wright and early
women's movement founders Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B.
Anthony -- and the results, like the multiple courses served at a
fine French restaurant, will finally be unveiled on P.B.S., starting
January 8, and continuing, in ten parts, until January 31. Aside
from the advance tchotchkes -- the coffee-table book, the CDs, the
magazine cover stories, the postcard collections, etc. etc. -- only
about an hour and a half, excerpted from several episodes, has been
made available to members of the press, and I am happy to report
that the material thus seen has more interesting stuff in it than a
lot of full-length feature films that came out over the last year. I
can only imagine, or hope, that the rest of the documentary
(seventeen-and-a-half hours worth -- as Judith Crist would say ,
clear your evenings, or your VCRs, in advance) will be just as good.
Jazz has its origins in the
blues and spirituals that were brought to, or created in, the
American South; in the honky-tonk music of saloons, chorus girl
shows, and bordellos both well-appointed or not; and in the ragtime
music that heralded the American "century of progress" at
the turn of the 20th century. Jazz accommodated both the extreme
highs and lows of the blues and ragtime. (Appropriately, the opening
episode of Jazz is entitled "Gumbo.") Louis
Armstrong is introduced in the series with an amazing piece of early
sound film, stepping forward from his seven-man combo and telling
us, "I'm Mr. Armstrong, and we're going to swing one of the
good ol' good ones for ya..." Upon which he starts up the group
in a rendition of Dinah, his back to us but with his head down and
shoulders working as he gets things started, with a conspiratorial
glance or two at us. The musician Matt Glasser, over half a century
later, gives us some wonderful commentary on how they play this
song, elocuting on the recording phrase by phrase as the musicians
create something exhilarating. Then we hear Armstrong in a recording
of Black and Blue --
originally written as a song sung by a woman about her wandering man
-- and how he turns it into an introspection by an African-American
trying to live in the heinously restrictive conditions of the time.
Called the "most influential" singer of the twentieth
century (and I am not inclined to dispute it), Stanley Crouch puts
the capper on things when he says that, anybody who would want to go
back to "the old way" of crooning a tune after hearing
Armstrong sing, "He'd need to be deported. To somewhere. Not on
the Earth. Maybe Pluto."
From Armstrong, there is the
evolution, by way of the naughty, bawdy, legendary clubs of Kansas
City, Missouri, to swing, probably the single most influential
element on Americans fighting in the Second World War -- whether on
the homefront, in Europe, or in the blistering Pacific, it was both
a morale booster and a reminder of what everyone was fighting for.
(The excerpts from the episodes in Jazz devoted to swing
virtually burst with energy, and should be knockouts.) Meanwhile, on
New York's 53rd Street, Billie Holiday was creating a genuine
sensation, starting in 1939, with her renditions of Strange Fruit at
the club Café Society (which called itself "the wrong club for
the right people"). One of the most surprising, and enjoyable,
commentators to appear in Jazz is Buck O'Neil, a former
player in the segregated all-black baseball league who was first
interviewed for Baseball, and who turns out to have been a jazz
aficionado, as well, and he speaks wonderfully about it. Of
"Lady Day" (a moniker bestowed upon Billie Holiday by
saxophonist Lester Young), O'Neil says, "Anybody could sing [a]
song, and when Lady Day sung it, it was a different song
altogether.... It just made you feel good all over, or,...she'd make
you maybe wanna cry. It might bring back the greatest moments in
your life, and it might bring back the saddest moments in your
life."
After 1946, musicians broke from
the big bands and began playing on their own, in clubs where there
was music but no dancing -- the creation of be-bop, the soundtrack
music for the "bohemian" and "beat" culture of
the Fifties. Charlie Parker, who played with Dizzy Gillespie's group
before going it alone, is recalled by drummer Stan Levey, who
describes a torturous cross-country tour to play on the West coast
(where jazz fans couldn't figure out what this new be-bop freeform
was all about): in one instance, Parker walks off a train in the
middle of the Southwestern desert, disoriented and looking for a fix
of the heroin that he had been hooked on since his teen years. (Chet
Baker's recently-published memoirs revealed that all the West coast
musicians gave heroin a try, just to see what it was like, without
knowing what they were letting themselves in for.) Parker said that
a recording he made at the time of Lover Man should be "stomped
into the ground"; naturally, it became one of his most popular
recordings and still turns up most often on compilations of his
music.
Duke Ellington, one of the greatest
American musicians, kept his big band together in the Fifties but
was in dire straits, until he let tenor-saxophonist Paul Gonsalves
riff for twenty-seven choruses on a performance of Diminuendo and
Crescendo in Blue at the 1956 Newport, Rhode Island jazz festival.
The audience then demanded four encores. (Gonsalves' bravado
high-end notes can be heard echoing through Gerald Wilson's trumpet
in Ellington's music for Anatomy of a Murder.) The Newport festival
is a good example of what many people in the series repeatedly refer
to as jazz's "inclusive" quality -- the 1958 festival,
captured on film in Jazz on a Summer's Day, included on its program
Gerry Mulligan, Dinah Washington, Anita O'Day (whose scattershot
rendition of Tea for Two is first seen bewildering, then
enrapturing, the audience in attendance), Louis Armstrong, and, as
the final performer, the great gospel singer Mahalia Jackson.
From Armstrong to the "swingos"
(as a lachrymose writer for Variety is quoted as having called swing
fans and musicians) to Ellington and Gonsalves, the both inclusive
and improvisational music form would continue in the music of Miles
Davis (who had no trouble dipping into Spanish music traditions for
"Sketches in Spain," or in the emerging rock-and-roll form
to help create the controversial "jazz fusion" movement),
Thelonious Monk (deeply mysterious in person, but a genius at the
keyboard), and Dave Brubeck (whose playing had the clear, precise
beauty of an Einstein equation, or a painting by Picasso or Joan Miró);
the scat-singing of Ella Fitzgerald (who, like Billie Holiday, has
been much imitated, never duplicated); the expansive, crystal, lunar
performances by pianist Keith Jarrett (who played just as darn long
as he wanted to, and he did so, too); and on up to such present-day
icons as Herbie Hancock, Marian McPartland, Pat Metheny, Gato
Barbieri, and the Marsalises, "pere" and "fils."
To name a few. (You can throw in Kenny G., too. If you want to.)
Some years ago, a friend of mine,
who said that his wife played with a local jazz group, was told by
someone that, well, that was just fine, if only "everyone
played together." My friend was polite but, understandably,
chagrined by this response. What's great about jazz is that
everybody can play it, that everybody can play it together, and that
it can go wherever it goes, be what it will, and the form still
holds together. Chet Baker could jam on short notice with Dave
Brubeck, as he did at the 1955 Newport Jazz Festival, or with Van
Morrison and Elvis Costello, as he did at Ronnie Scott's in the
mid-1980s. Michel Legrand could make recordings with Miles Davis (in
both the Fifties and the Nineties), Lena Horne, or Jessye Norman.
Davis, in turn, could record, with a quartet of musicians, the music
for Louis Malle's Elevator to the Gallows over the course of two
nights, nothing written down in advance, in a screening room (and
all the tracks have been issued on CD to prove it).
Jazz is capable of great
raucousness and intensely personal expressions. Wynton Marsalis
calls it "the soul of our nation," while Albert Murray
describes it as music that "always moves in the direction of
elegance, which is the most civilized thing a human being can do.
The ultimate extension, elocution, and refinement of effort is
elegance, where just doing it gives pleasure of itself. That's about
as far as we can get by Life."
And, as Keith David says in the
narration for Jazz, "Above all, it swings." During
the three times I saw the preview tape, my foot never stopped
keeping time with the music.
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